Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (19 page)

Born and raised in the United States, Peter and his friends laid claim to black Americans’ right to participate in the national body politic and enjoy all the privileges and obligations of citizenship. For them, this meant the right to vote.

New York state’s earlier constitution had placed no racial restrictions on voting. But, worried about the impending emancipation of slaves and the increased number of free blacks that would ensue, the legislature began debating the necessity of instituting voting qualifications with the goal of restricting black men’s right to suffrage. Relying on racist theories of black intellectual inferiority, white statesmen
argued that black men were too easily swayed by stronger parties or too willingly sold their vote. To prove their worthiness, they would have to show that they had the intelligence and ability to acquire property. In 1821, the legislature instituted a voting property qualification for black men of $250.

Many men of the black elite suddenly found themselves denied a right that had once been theirs. They were not about to take it lying down. In August 1837, a group led by the
Colored American
editors Samuel Cornish and Philip Bell, educator Ransom Wake, and Thomas Downing called for a public meeting to organize a petition drive throughout the state for the restitution of black male suffrage.

It’s hard to tell who among New York’s black male population could vote in 1840. In 1835, approximately 15,000 blacks lived in the city, 84 of whom were taxed, and 68 of whom met the voting requirements of the 1821 constitution. In 1845, the number of black New Yorkers dropped by about 2,000; yet although the number of taxed had risen to 255, only a mere 91 were entitled to vote.
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We know from comments in the
Colored American
that Peter Williams voted. My guess is that, as the proprietor of a prosperous restaurant, Thomas Downing did too. And surely the land and homes of the black freeholders on Collect Street met the necessary property qualifications. Peter’s brother-in-law Albro Lyons was possibly a voter, since he had established his home uptown on land that I’m guessing had originally belonged to his in-laws, the Marshalls.

In demanding the restitution of the vote, black leaders harkened back to the ideals of liberty, equality, and citizenship enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. But they were also emboldened by the example of Haiti, the former French colony that had achieved independence in 1804 after a long and bloody revolution. Black Americans were intensely proud of the New World’s first black republic. They got most of their information about Haiti through reading. The African Free School curriculum supplied basic facts;
Freedom’s Journal
and the
Colored American
supplemented with a plethora of articles. Some visited the island. In 1818, a group of disillusioned black New Yorkers that included Peter Williams Jr., Boston Crummell, and Samuel Cornish had formed the Haytian Emigration Society of Coloured People. They carefully distinguished between colonization—conservative whites’ attempt to repatriate
free blacks to Liberia—and emigration, black Americans’ voluntary exile to countries in the diaspora. Williams traveled to Haiti in 1824 to assess conditions for settlement. His report resulted in the emigration of some six thousand people, although he himself remained in the city.
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Still others, like Peter and the Reason brothers, were of Haitian origins. Several years before the August 1837 call, they had established the Société des Amis Réuni and named Peter secretary; it lasted from 1833 until at least 1841. I haven’t been able to find any written record of the society’s goals, but its very name echoes that of the Société des Amis des Noirs, an organization created by liberal French politicians in 1788 to lobby for the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue and for the voting rights of the colony’s
gens de couleur
, its elite mulatto class. By invoking the name of the famed abolitionist society, these men were both commemorating it and using it as a call to action.
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This younger generation quickly added its voice to the elders’. In August 1831, Peter, Albro Lyons, George Downing, Henry Highland Garnet, and others published a call in the
Colored American
for all “Colored Young Men” to attend an important meeting at Philomathean Hall. A Standing Corresponding Committee of ten was formed to draw up petitions, and committees of three persons were established in each ward to circulate them for signatures. Peter was one of the ten men appointed to the Standing Corresponding Committee and was also placed on the Fifth Ward committee. It took another ten months of hard work, but by July 1838 the New York Association for the Political Elevation and Improvement of the People of Color was finally formed and began meeting regularly.

In helping to create the New York Association, this new generation stepped into the foreground. They were working not under the direction of the “old heads” but as equal collaborators. In fact, they trumpeted the advantages of youth. “Young men,” they proclaimed, “are important and efficient agents.” To justify their newfound activism, they insisted that they were merely obeying the orders of now deceased leaders like William Hamilton, who spoke to them “(as it were) from the Tomb. Youth of my people, I look to you. With you rests the high responsibility of redeeming the character of our people. … Oh, Heavens! that I could rouse you. Oh! That I could inflame you with proper ambition!”
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To the
extent that they were asserting aggressive leadership, they seemed to be saying, it was because Hamilton demanded it of them.

Peter and his friends were experimenting with black political organization. They adopted the interracial abolitionist mantra of “Agitation, agitation, agitation,” while working within the black community. Moving beyond the confines of the city, they called for the statewide creation of organizations similar to the New York Association, charging them with drafting and circulating petitions for signatures. Their goal was to deluge the state legislature with the petitions, but before doing so they called on representatives of all the associations to meet at a convention to decide how best to act in concert.
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It was not all smooth sailing. Political movements, even those of subordinated groups fighting to overcome oppression, all too often succumb to dissension and divisiveness. This early drive for the restitution of black male suffrage was no exception. Community leaders—young and old alike—all agreed on the wrongs committed against them and the need for redress. But they did not necessarily agree on the political arguments to be made or strategies to be pursued.

James McCune Smith was the focus, and often the instigator, of the turmoil that ensued. Not yet thirty years old, Smith was already emerging as the intellectual force within New York’s black community. As one of his staunchest supporters, Peter stood by his side, serving as his mouthpiece and facilitator. Smith was no mere gadfly, but earnestly struggled to come up with the strongest arguments in the fight for black equality. He crafted two arguments. The first was that of universality, the assertion that black Americans deserved as Americans to be granted the universal rights of citizenship; the second, that of particularity, the claim that, given their history of racial oppression, black Americans had a special destiny of suffering and redemption. These intellectual dilemmas would preoccupy Smith and other black leaders in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Dissension burst out into the open in the summer of 1840 when the state’s political associations decided to hold an all-black convention in Albany to devise a general strategy for the restitution of black male suffrage. The
Colored American
repeatedly published a call to attend. There were too many signatories to the call to name here, but they included Peter, his two brothers-in-law, John Peterson, a well-respected educator and St. Philip’s lay reader, and both Reason brothers. Smith’s name was not on the list.

In early August, a large crowd attended an organizational meeting at Philomathean Hall. That’s when the bombshell went off. Its cause was the thorny issue of separate institutions. White abolitionists had already voiced their opposition to the Albany convention, but now objections came from within, most notably from John Peterson. He based his arguments on expediency: since the majority of New York state’s population was white and hostile to black political rights, blacks as a minority and a “distinct people” had no hope of “influencing the said white majority, neither by interest, fear, nor by superior intellectual power.” Hence, an all-black convention would be counterproductive. Working in tandem, Peter and Smith then asked to speak. Peter presented a series of resolutions against the planned convention, which Smith then rose to support. I’m pretty sure that Smith put Peter up to this, using his quiet and unassuming friend as a stalking horse. Although coming to the same conclusion as Peterson, Peter and Smith’s reasoning differed substantially from the older man’s. With greater sophistication, they grounded their argument against separate action in principle. Distinguishing people on the basis of skin color was a “virtual acknowledgment that there are rights peculiar to the color of a man’s skin, thus fostering prejudice against complexion.” Separate action was harmful because it reinforced the idea of separate races. Peter and Smith failed to get their resolutions passed.
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The Albany convention took place as planned. Because of his status in the community, Smith was nominated as a delegate and reluctantly agreed to attend. But neither he nor Peter appeared.

The Albany convention brought tangible results. By February 1841, its organizers proudly reported that they had collected approximately 2,200 signatures, 1,300 of which came from the city; in addition, about
600 sympathetic whites also signed the petitions.
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Energized, black New Yorkers held several mass meetings in the city.

Given the heightened excitement, neither Peter nor Smith could stay out of politics for long. Both men attended the New York County convention in October 1841. Throughout the year Smith had been building his case piece by piece. He made himself heard.

Most of the convention delegates argued that black men could not vote because their color precluded them from being able “to perform the duties assigned to other citizens.” Hence, the property qualification was unconstitutional because it was based on racial discrimination. Building upon his earlier ideas, Smith was determined to circumvent racial arguments. He maintained that all colored citizens, just like all whites, were subject to taxation, direct and indirect. Therefore, the property qualification was unconstitutional because it violated the principle of no taxation without representation, which had nothing to do with race. Smith (and Peter) presented the case from the perspective of the universal rights of citizens and not of racially discriminatory legislation.
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Peter and Smith could devise such sophisticated arguments because of all they had learned at the Mulberry Street School. They, and the rest of New York’s black leadership, understood that education was key to political advancement. “The school-master must be aroused,” they declared, “and sent abroad to light up the torch of education, and throw light into the minds of the youth of the land.” Surely, an educated black population would successfully “overthrow the imputations … declaring us to be an illiterate, defenceless, and divided people” and prove its intellectual qualifications to vote.
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Black leaders pressed the issue of education from two distinct but related perspectives. They asserted that literacy and literary knowledge would give blacks the rhetorical tools necessary to plead their case convincingly, disseminate it to the public through the press, and thus prove their capacity for civilization and culture. Inverting the argument, however, they insisted simultaneously that political rights were necessary for blacks to fulfill their literary and educational ambitions. It is, they maintained, “the political enfranchisement of our people upon which so much of our religious, literary and local happiness virtually depends.”
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If political and literary happiness depended on each other, it followed that Peter and his friends would work equally hard in establishing literary societies. They were not the first. In 1833, “old heads”—Peter Williams, Boston Crummell, Thomas Downing, and others—had created the Phoenix Society. This organization was not a separate institution, however, but depended on white philanthropy. The ubiquitous Arthur Tappan provided financial assistance and became treasurer; other whites also served as officers. The society’s goals were modest, limited to ensuring basic literacy among adults and children throughout the black community.
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Peter, however, was a member of another literary society that bore the name of the hall in which it met: the Philomathean Society. This society and its sister organization, the Phoenixonian Society, were autonomous, black-run institutions whose ambitions were loftier than those of the Phoenix Society. Little is known about the Philomathean Society’s origins. A notice in the
Colored American
of April 29, 1837, made passing reference to its foundation in 1830. Some years later, Peter and two of his friends, James Fields and Francis Myers, published an “Address of the Young Men of Color in the City of New York” in the May 2, 1840, issue of the paper. It was an open invitation to the young men of the community to “share in the advantages derived from literary pursuits” by helping to revive the Philomathean Society. Explaining the society’s original mission, they began by quoting from the preamble of its constitution: